C. Participation in Budgeting and Public Expenditure Management
4. Monitoring delivery of public services
Monitoring public services allows citizens’ groups to give concrete feedback to the government upon which it can act. It allows community organizations to express their demands in a constructive format and provides them with a vehicle to mobilize public opinion for more targeted policies and better delivery of services. Participatory monitoring of public service delivery is based on the following sets of actions:
1. Select indicators to monitor the performance of delivery mechanisms based on civil society inputs. In this manner, the indicators can serve as both standards for public service delivery and as public records of citizen opinions and perceptions.
2. Generate credible and sufficient data as part of a ready-made entry point for civil society organizations to monitor public services. This is key because the government often does not have established mechanisms to collect this sort of data. Furthermore, without this data, it is difficult to identify problem areas that need to be addressed and to hold specific agencies accountable for their role and performance.
3. Analyze data and compare it with established indicators. This requires that stakeholders in the community collectively decide whether public service delivery has met their expectation and discusses the empirical data it has gather over the course of its monitoring activities.
4. Provide feedback on and publicize the findings in order to affect change facilitates empowerment of the community by allowing it to communicate its approval and disapproval to the government and to demand an immediate response. Given that in the past, governments have seldom been held accountable, this mechanism offers the community a rare opportunity to come together, gather clear evidence of poor government performance, go directly to persons in positions of authority and then demand action.
Box 17. Case Example: Bangalore Public Service Report Cards
Inspired by a private sector practice of conducting client satisfaction surveys, a small group of people in Bangalore, concerned about the city’ deteriorating standards of public services, initiated an exercise in 1993 to collect feedback from users. User perceptions on the quality, efficiency, and adequacy of the various services were aggregated to create a ‘report card’ that rated the performance of all major service providers in the city. The findings presented a quantitative measure of satisfaction and perceived levels of corruption, which, following coverage in the media, not only mobilized citizen and government support for reform, but also prompted the rated agencies themselves to respond positively to civic calls for improvement in services. This exercise was repeated in 1999, and has been replicated in at least five other Indian cities, as well as the State of Karnataka in the interim. By systematically gathering and disseminating public feedback, report cards may serve as a “surrogate for competition” for monopolies – usually government owned – that lack the incentive to be as responsive as the private enterprises to their client’s needs. They are a useful medium through which citizens can credibly and collectively ‘signal’ to agencies about their performance and pressure for change.
Supported by a small advisory group of local leaders and funded through local donations, Dr. Samuel Paul with the help of a market research agency called Marketing and Business Associates (MBA) Ltd. first planned the initiative in 1993 to seek answers to three main questions, i) how satisfactory are the public services, ii) what aspects of the service are satisfactory and what are not, iii) what are the direct and indirect costs of acquiring these services? This informal exercise has since been institutionalized as one of the core functions of the Public Affairs Center, a non-profit society established in 1994 in Bangalore, with a goal of “improving governance in India by strengthening civil society institutions in their interactions with the state”13. Principally, PAC has focused its past six years on combining research with action, by supporting networking and capacity building of citizen initiatives to respond to knowledge revealed through systematic research on public policies and services.
Specifically on the 1993 initiative, after undertaking mini case-studies on some key urban problems, focus group discussions were held with two different sets of households – middle income (called general) and lower income (largely slum dwellers) to draft and finalize respective questionnaires. These were then pre-tested. The city was divided into six regions, and from each region, a random sample of households that had interacted with at least one of the service providers in the past six months was chosen. Around 480 households were drawn from a pool of middle and upper income groups and around 330 households representing the slum dwellers. Selected interviewees (men to women ratio was 7:3) were then asked by trained investigators to rate their level of satisfaction with a particular service provider’s overall performance as well as allied dimensions such as, i) staff behavior, ii) number of visits required to complete a task, and iii) frequency of problem resolution. People were asked to assign a rank from a scale of 1 to 7 (very dissatisfied to very satisfied). These were then aggregated to compute averages for overall perception of the quality of service. The extreme scores indicated what percentage of the people were either completely dissatisfied or completely satisfied with particular service providers. The list of the agencies had not been pre-determined, that is, people were not asked what they thought of agency A, but were rather questioned about whichever services they had availed of in the past 6 months.
Overall, the methodology employed was what has been described as a merger of statistically valid techniques with qualitative participant observation. When the exercise was repeated in 1999, there was some attempt to use the 1994 results as a benchmark by using similar scales for some questions, although sample size was increased this time to 1339 from the middle income category and 839 from the slums using a ‘multi-stage stratified sampling plan’. The way respondents were selected was quite elaborate too. A list of all polling booths for local assembly elections in 14 constituencies of the city was obtained from which 90 were randomly selected to serve as ‘starting points’ for investigators to go to and ask between 5 and 10 people about the services that they have encountered.
Similarly for the urban poor, 80 starting points were identified from four different categories of slums. The collection of responses was then entered into a computer and analyzed using a software package.
On dissemination, unlike in 1994, when all key findings were flashed through the media, in 1999, the Public Affairs Center decided to first present mini report cards to four of the key service providers (telephone, water, electricity and the municipality) to solicit their initial reaction. In the interactions, the agencies did not dispute the findings at all, and instead felt the pressure to be defensive about their performance by presenting constraints they had to work with. After these selective meetings, the 1999 report was circulated to all public agencies and senior state government officials. This was followed by a launch ceremony for the press – a crucial ally in the process. After letting the findings sink in through a heavy media coverage, a two-part workshop was organized involving senior officials from the agencies and the public. The first part allowed the agency officials to interact and learn from each other on what some of the more responsive agencies14 were doing to best address the criticisms. The second part involved the head of the agencies answering questions from assembled citizens on what steps were being proposed to improve the quality, efficiency and adequacy of their services.
Over the 5 years between the first and the second report card initiatives, partial improvement in services such as the telephones and the hospitals were noted. However, overall citizen satisfaction remained low, with even the better performers scoring less than 50% satisfaction rating. People seemed even less satisfied with the way staff interacted with the clients. Bangalore Telecoms, for instance, had the highest overall satisfaction rating of 67%, but this dropped sharply to only 30% among a sub-sample of people who interfaced with the agency personnel to solve a specific problem. The scale of corruption was perceived to have grown with both the number of people paying bribes and the amount they were paying increasing. 92% of the respondents said they visited the agencies in person to solve a problem and two-thirds of the time, they needed to make two or more such visits. Over half the cases involving bribes were extortionate in nature, while a third had been voluntary ‘speed’ payments.
A separate report card on the slum dwellers in 1999 also found that they were more happy with services such as transport, schools, electricity and hospitals than with the police, water supply and garbage clearance. The urban poor had to visit the agencies more often than the middle class to solve a similar problem, and had lower problem resolution rates, although, probably because of low expectations, they seemed more satisfied with the same services than people with higher incomes. The proportion of people who were made to pay a bribe in order to access the services was also higher for the poor than the middle-income group: in 1993, a third of the urban poor (surveyed) said they had paid a bribe. While this ratio dropped to 25% five years later, average amount paid had increased three-fold to Rupees. 1245 per case, largely to the police.
The report cards indicate that there is a clear link between petty corruption and inefficiency of service providers that have non-transparent procedures, and arbitrary decision making powers vested in officials. A better access to information, clear specification of service standards and customer rights, and sustained public scrutiny and monitoring of performance through institutionalized report card initiatives has been suggested to be helpful in curbing both the vices by shaming the ‘baddies’ and creating public awareness and building up pressure.
Participatory public expenditure management in the PRSP is a key building block for increasing transparency and accountability in governance. It can do this by providing a substantive entry point for participatory processes into the overall poverty reduction strategy process. Initially, participatory approaches can be used to benchmark government performance through budget analysis, expenditure tracking and public service delivery monitoring. Then overtime, they can be used to measure changes in government adherence to policy decisions, service provision and overall poverty reduction efforts.
Summary: Key Lessons from Civic Engagement in Public Expenditure Management
Three key lessons that have emerged from experience in participatory public expenditure management are:
• Link the budget directly to poverty reduction priorities and outcomes identified in the beginning of the participatory processes, such as increasing the ability of civil society to engage public expenditure management processes and promoting public debates on budget and public service delivery issues.
• Develop a medium term expenditure framework (MTEF) in conjunction with the PRSP
• Focus participatory efforts on budget making and analysis, expenditure tracking, and public service delivery.